FB: Old Dominion Athletic Conference

[Matt Barnhart (kid)]

I sorta hate to bring this up but Street and Smith has BC #17 and W&L #25.  That is from memory sneaking a peek at Food Lion so i may be off a bit. I can't believe Kid hasn't posted it already.

As I told WLU78, I've been keeping most BC-related news off these boards.  Check out Bridgewaterfootball.com for all that stuff.

[Llamaguy]

As I told WLU78, I've been keeping most BC-related news off these boards.  Check out Bridgewaterfootball.com for all that stuff.

Aw shucks! I was hoping you would fill us in on the attributes of BC's 4th string tailback Kid. 

What up, K-Mack? Not quite chicken grillin' season but it will be here soon enough!

Are you ready for some football? 

[xbcdad]

He has ... on the BC football blog (sorry for no hyperlink)

Duh! i should have known better. I noticed that there hadn't been a recent blog update and assumed that was the latest. I'm used to having flashing lights and scrolling messages. I guess after last year this is the humbler more subdued eagle fan.

[Ralph Turner]

I think I need to just give up.

I certainly hope you don't.

I think he gave up because his point can't stand up to reason.

I found this web site interesting.  W&L may have more in common with the SCAC...Associated Colleges of the South.

The travel would be the killer!

[yellow jacket]

Thanks Matt,

I've been reading this board regularly for 4 years, and while I respect your dedication to Bridgewater, I hope the football players aren't as dedicated, so that they don't do quite as well this year  .

In all honesty, I loved playing Bridgewater just because they were (and are) the top dog.  Too bad I kept getting hurt.

[K-Mack]

Whoa ... we scheduled Carnegie Mellon? Good lord.

After back-to-back weeks with Washington & Lee and the Tartans, our team should be demoralized by their relative lack of brainpower and football skill. When they lose, they won't even be able to sing "It's allright, it's OK, you'll all pump our gas someday!"

I'm advising APD to assemble a suicide watch task force for the weeks of Sept. 29 and Oct. 6.

Can we get Coach Ric out of retirement? That guy never lost to W&L.

(also didn't)

Loved Coach Ric.  He was one of the reasons why we were so good during the '90s.

But back to football as it currently exists.  Hopefully Pedro gets it done this year.  This is his 4th season, I believe, and it's time to produce some results.  I'd like to see 7-3, or heck, 6-4.  

But I'll take 5-5.  And this may (will) be a stretch.  We close the year with road games at Guilford and Bridgewater and a home game with the Tigers on November 10.  Based on our performances since 2004 against these teams, I don't think we'll be winning these games.  I also don't think we'll beat Johnny Hop or Denison (road games).

I do like our chances against W&L, E&H, and CUA, though, to win or keep it close.  I don't know much about Frostburg or Carnegie Mellon, but will assume from your tone, K-Mack, we will probably get worked.

OK, here we good ... SOME FOOTBALL TALK!

I liked Coach Ric a lot too. He wasn't perfect, but he demanded a lot, he went to bat for his guys and he had the perfect complement in Gregg Watters.

Riccio ran the defense, yelled, spit and gave impassioned speeches. Watters ran the offense, was calm, caring and when you messed up, he just gave you this 'I'm disappointed in you' look, and you'd feel guilty for letting him down.

And I don't think I realized it at the time, but both of them, along with Coach Boston, could recruit.

On that staff, you also had Mark Puccinelli, who was the lineman's line coach -- he was one of them, and they loved him, and you had Marty White, who worked in financial aid, and could always point recruits in the direction of the smartest loans and grants to take care of that $17,900 (which is now $31,000)

Sorry to bore the Quakers and Cardinals out there ... Point is, there was continuity on the coaching staff.

One of the things that breeds is familiarity with high schools and high school coaches on the recruiting trail, as well as familiarity with the schemes and such. Every year a player is not learning a new offense/defense, he is refining himself in that system.

Riccio gave us so many multiple looks on defense, it literally won games for us. Busting 5-under man, 2-deep zone out against Catholic in '96 is mainly responsible for my 4-interception game. It was masterful (as was Favret's game plan for us the next year, but I digress). Against Emory & Henry in '96, (this was the defacto ODAC title game back then, unless Guilford had a good year) Riccio was looking at down & distance, and the formation and literally calling out the Wasps' plays to the defense. He had them pegged to a tee. We took a 20-0 lead in the first quarter. That got him so excited (I'll never forget him high-fiving us at the numbers after a goal-line stand) that he got his heart rate above 200. Having a history of heart problems, they took him to the hospital at halftime, we played base defense the whole second half (until the great Tim Armoska -- R.I.P. -- started calling blitzes for himself) and we lost 24-20.

Anyway, I'm reminiscing, but I'm going somewhere.

That kind of institutional knowledge, so to speak, is hard to replace. When things started to go south in the Boone years (he won with Riccio & Waters' players) a confluence of things were likely responsible. Boone could coach. I'm not sure he could lead like Riccio, and I don't know if he could recruit like him. But I don't blame Boone either, unless he was somehow responsible for not being able to keep a coaching staff together like Ric did.

I think that hurts doubly, on the recruiting trail and on the field. What you also had at that time was an increased demand in the player pool that R-MC drew from ... CNU, Averett and Shenandoah are recruiting by the 100s, for their first team. Mike Clark is building something special at Bridgewater, and Marty Favret is not far behind at H-SC, and the great Lou Wacker was doing what he's always done for E&H.

Suddenly we've got a lot more competition. I also heard coaches for other R-MC sports complain about the lack of support from the admissions office ... at this time Macon seemed to be going through a transition to where they were trying to gave as many students as possible a little bit of help to defray the rising tuition costs. Football doesn't have its guy in financial aid anymore. Coach Boston and Boone apparently did not get along, so the lead recruiter for most of the 90s, Boston, was gone.

There was that 6-4 year where Boone did it his way, with his hires and his recruits and it looked to all be going in the right direction, and then it all came crashing down.

I don't have any particular insight as to why Arruza was hired, but he's billed as a no-nonsense, we're gonna do it the right way type ... and probably a guy who can relate, having gone through some tough times himself and having excelled as a player.

They left him with a heck of a mess to clean up.

By this point, everyone who I'd been close with, just about, in the R-MC athletic department was gone, and I have a lot less insight into what the issues are on campus.

But from afar you can infer that it was a program that lost its identity amid all the change (a very similar thing happened at once-proud Catholic) and fell behind its conference/state running mates, many of whom were on the upswing.

Arruza may be giving the program a new, strong identity. But that takes time. And with basically everyone being competitive, it might be harder to win now in the ODAC than it ever was.

One other thing Boone did that was admirable, though it backfired, is that he took the new emphasis on the AQ to mean you could schedule aggressively non-conference, so as to prepare for the ODAC games. So he took Western Maryland aka McDaniel (dominant CC team at the time) and Washington & Jefferson and added them to a schedule which already had tough games with E&H and CUA and Davidson, which suddenly decided to begin playing like a I-AA football team. So you know you could go 5-5 with losses to five legitimate teams, and that's before Bridgewater broke all the way out. You basically had to avoid being demoralized early so you could make the ODAC run (though R-MC had traditionally be a slow-starting team)

In any case, that's my view of some of the things that happened to our program. They aren't things you can really lay at the foot of any one person.

They are my opinions, and not neccessarily a reflection of fact.

But you know, from the first ODAC season ('76) through 1997, every four-year senior at R-MC would have experienced at least one ODAC championship, except the 85-88 class, I think. Now, it's going on 10 seasons without one.

If you care about the program, that's not all that easy to accept.

[K-Mack]

Loved Coach Ric.  He was one of the reasons why we were so good during the '90s.

But back to football as it currently exists.   Hopefully Pedro gets it done this year.  This is his 4th season, I believe, and it's time to produce some results.  I'd like to see 7-3, or heck, 6-4.  

But I'll take 5-5.  And this may (will) be a stretch.  We close the year with road games at Guilford and Bridgewater and a home game with the Tigers on November 10.  Based on our performances since 2004 against these teams, I don't think we'll be winning these games.  I also don't think we'll beat Johnny Hop or Denison (road games).

I do like our chances against W&L, E&H, and CUA, though, to win or keep it close.  I don't know much about Frostburg or Carnegie Mellon, but will assume from your tone, K-Mack, we will probably get worked.

I don't think Denison is anything to fear. Long trip, that's all.

Johns Hopkins is down from two years' ago's playoff team, so there's hope, but yeah, I wouldn't assume win.

Frostburg, could go either way. Probably the asterisk game that could propel them to a good season if they can get some confidence by winning it.

Carnegie Mellon ... well, I was being a little facetious in my post ... but one thing R-MC has going for it is that they're a system team. They apparently have a lot back, and were a legit playoff team last year. But they do what they do, and they do it well. I believe it's Wing-T ... which, having played Gettysburg in my R-MC years, it's either hit or miss.

It can hurt you, or you can hurt it. If you've got it nailed, there aren't a whole lot of wrinkles they can throw at you.

But it'll be a real physical game. You'd think speed and finesse would matchup well against them, but it didn't work for Millsaps last year.

I don't know how R-MC will match up.

As far as yellow jacket's comments about Arruza ... I am all for that kind of leadership. Wins or not, football and the mentors/friends you meet along the way will help you be a man. I maintain to this day that not much bothers me partly because in football you are drilled to be calm under pressure and believe. Fourth-and-1, you know you're going stop them. You just do. And you know you'll do whatever it takes to make that stop.

Life's pressures can be handled in a similar way, whether it's work, parenting, financial woes. If you tackle things head on, you believe, you do things the right way, you prepare yourself for success ... good things will generally happen. Even if you don't have a diploma from W&L.

As far as the job world, I don't think it's all who you know (never you mind how I ended up at USA Today) ... that certainly helps. So does a challenging education.

Your credentials vary from field to field. A writer, or a stock broker or something ... after their first job, they are probably going to have some tangible results to show their second employer. "I made my clients this much money" or "These are the stories I broke and how I pursued them." Those things will probably trump whatever you did in college. Even your internships might make a stronger impression than your overall Liberal Arts GPA.

There are other fields, and grad schools, that take test scores and GPAs into account. A school that has produced strong grad students in the past, or sends x % of its grads from a particular discipline on to PhDs, can be a real asset in trying to move on to your next stop.

One thing that likely holds true across the board though: Finishing college means you can take on challenging, long-term tasks, follow directions, learn/adjust as you go, and see them through.

That will help in most fields, I'd guess.

You'll probably have to convince people whenever and whereever you interview that you can not just handle whatever they throw at you, but you can excel at it. Too much sometimes seems fake, but a confidence in your ability, or adaptability, is probably usually a good thing.

Don't get discouraged. Almost all of us has to pay our dues, and probably questioned whether we selected the right path. Just like when you were buried on the depth chart and wondered if you'd ever work your way into the stardom you projected for yourself.

Follow the right path. Good things usually happen.

[K-Mack]

back in the day when only 8 teams went to the playoffs. I think D3 would do themselves a favor by returning to that format, but thats just my opinion.

Really? Surely there were far fewer teams then though.

Right now we're looking at 236 playoff-eligible teams this season (if my math, and assessment of NNA and Geneva is correct) ... an eight-team playoff?

PLU was a six or seven seed in its own region and won it all in 1999.
UMHB didn't win its conference in '04, but won five road games including one at Mount Union to make a very deserving trip to the Stagg Bowl.

The first round features some mismatches, but usually by the round of 16 there are more great games than not. Maybe that's not always true, but there have been a lot of great, great playoff games since the expansion to 28 and again to 32.

The ratio is near the NCAA's preferred 7.5-to-1 teams to playoff bids preference.

Plus, there should never, ever be another 1998, where five South Region teams went undefeated, and Emory & Henry got left out of the postseason at 10-0 because nobody beat Catholic, W. Maryland, Trinity and Lycoming either.

With eight bids, how do you pick fairly amongst the unbeaten teams (there can definitely be more than eight a year), not to mention the one-loss squads.

What part of the format do you favor? Do you not like the AQ?

[K-Mack]

Hopefully I'll be able to watch my team beat the Tigers this year (unfortunately, I went 0-4).

Dang. I went 3-1 and the one still burns ... you know, since they threw goalposts in the lake afterward and all.

In other news about that game, however, we had an attendance thread going elsewhere on the board last year, and I don't believe any (or many) documented games in (recent?) D3 history have had higher attendance than The Game in '94 at Death Valley.

[K-Mack]

It's got to be the dog days of summer when we spend multiple pages debating the academic merits of various schools.

At the risk of kicking the dead that started this debate (the reallignment of the ODAC and USAC) I will ask if anyone else has heard that SU has or will be petitioning the ODAC for membership. I haven't taken the time to read all the posts so perhaps I missed it. I'd classify my source as VERY relaible. That said, I have no idea what the disposition of the matter might be at this point. It would certainly make sense geographically.

That would actually seem to be a fit, at least on the surface.

Maybe it's also in preparation/fear of a Christopher Newport move to I-AA (although I was told last year at the UMHB game that they are very happy in Division III. Great campus, wonderful facilities, BTW)

[allsky7]

Hopefully I'll be able to watch my team beat the Tigers this year (unfortunately, I went 0-4).

Dang. I went 3-1 and the one still burns ... you know, since they threw goalposts in the lake afterward and all.

In other news about that game, however, we had an attendance thread going elsewhere on the board last year, and I don't believe any (or many) documented games in (recent?) D3 history have had higher attendance than The Game in '94 at Death Valley.

     Guestimated at 14,000...I will long remember that day. As far as I know, the goalpost are still in Chalgrove Lake. An eternal reminder of a Tiger victory in #100. 

[Jacketlawyer]

Jacket,

Thanks for your offer.  I did not mean to convey the notion that I did not have a job.  I actually do.  But during the interview process, it seemed to me that academics were not the suit they were looking for.

As to grad school....I would have done it, but god, I was ready for tests to be over.  Little did I know that working for my current job I will be taking 3 or 4 financial tests.  Oops.

Thanks anyways for the offer for help Jacket.  This is what I think separates small schools that can be found in the ODAC as compared to bigger schools.  Alumni support.

Hey Man, the offer is still open, and it'll remain that way.  Good luck with that Series 7!

But since you're a recent grad, this makes you ripe for the pickin'.  What do we need to do to turn things around up there in Ashland?

I can't wait for some football myself!

[Jacketlawyer]

     Guestimated at 14,000...I will long remember that day. As far as I know, the goalpost are still in Chalgrove Lake. An eternal reminder of a Tiger victory in #100. 

I remember that one (I think).  As I recall we were favored and we lost.  As a result I think I crawled into a Maker's Mark bottle.

[PrideSportBBallGuy]

I agree with your whole post, except for the Go Tigers portion  .  I thought debt in college was bad.  Real life is horrible, and I'm still acting like a poor college student.

Hopefully I'll be able to watch my team beat the Tigers this year (unfortunately, I went 0-4).

I agree with your thoughts. As a person in a position to review resumes and involved in the hiring process, I do look at what school the candidate attended. I do not look for GPA and I do not give extra consideration for the Greek activities in, and of, themselves. I do, however,  give credence to extra-curicular activity - that's where the PBK stuff will show up, but other things are considered equally. I think every person that is in a position to review candidates' resumes is different.

Obviously anyone from CNU or William & Mary makes it to the right pile in round 1!!

This is really for anybody-

School does matter to alot of organizations. Somone I know applied to work an internship at the ACC (Yes Atlantic Coast Conference) they didn't say they wouldn't hire but they didn't say they would hire.  They said that it is a small office and when job opportunities are available they give preference to graduates of ACC Schools and for internship programs student athletes of the ACC.  Some might not see it as fair, but what can you do.

[tigerfanalso]

KMack

I don't have a clue how many D3 teams in 1977; but as you said I'm confident far fewer than today.

I really don't have an issue with today's format other than the # of teams invited. Too many teams/too many playoff games makes the season too long (for D3). Playing football into final exams is something D3 should probably rethink. Take the 16 best teams and have at it.

I'm confident most will disagree with my opinion but that is what makes for good debate !!!!  One day closer to September